Flock cameras used to arrest a child for playing on a swing?
youtube.com
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https://www.wtae.com/article/springdale-playground-swing-cou...
"The borough also says visitors encounter its "Play Smart Rules" when entering the park, including a specific instruction: "Do not twist chains.""
So the town buys crappy swings, knowing full well that kids are going to spin them (who hasn't done this a million times as a kid?) Then they slap up a sign telling the kids not to do that. Basically entrapment.
Here's an idea for them: maybe the town shouldn't cheap out on unsafe equipment for children...
And the rule is very clear. If there is any possibility of an issue, you need to redesign it so the problem can't happen, you need to put gaurds in place so the problem can't happen, or only if those two fail, are you allowed to put up a warning sign. That is an ordered list so if anything is possible in the previous step you cannot go to the next.
In this case a chain that can take twisting is obvious and so the sign won't protect them from liability should someone get hurt from twisting the chains.
But the problem with twisting chains is that it needs a warning.
And so both putting in the law, and arresting the kid, are a way to protect the borough, a government organization, from liability when something goes wrong.
TF? Doesn't your country have a Constitution?
All the small decisions we are making will shape our future: algorithmic decision making, social network broadcasting and "self-reporting", light-speed meme transmission, always-on audio and video surveillance... the list goes on and on. One day we'll wake up to see we've build a jail around us we can't escape.
So, in my city each and every window has metal grills, without anyway to open them, nor we have fire exit, except very few. So, the only way out is the frontdoor. Reason being, It's unsafe to have open windows because of robbers, thieves, rapist etc, which is legit safety concern. But you only have one way out of your safe heaven, the frontdoor, so what happens the day your stairs caught fire? Or earthquake blocks the front door? Or someone just sits there with a gun? You have no way out of your own home.
We really have built jail around us, that we can't escape.
That being said, one of the best ways to fight surveillance as a concept is authenticity. The goal of the watchers is enforce constraints - limit where you go, who you talk to, how you dress, how you behave, etc - and remaining defiantly authentic lets them know those tactics won't work while simultaneously broadcasting to others that you reject the power those cameras have over you.
Surveillance succeeds because of fear, and it always falls because of authenticity.
It's wild.
Eg imagine if one of these surveillance companies gets hacked. Personal data and the habits of a hundred million people get compromised.
The penalties for this should be enough to make everyone affected whole.
If your neighbor had a secret camera in your home - what would it take to make you whole? I imagine most people would be okay with like $50k (or some other large sum like that).
Are these surveillance companies ready to pay $50k per person? Hell no. 100M * 50k = $5 trillion.
Nobody can afford to pay that much. They either end up going bankrupt or are absolved of this responsibility. Either way, the people affected will not be made whole.
That is a decision that is being made by billionaires like Paul Graham who fund and profit from it, and authoritarian individuals at police departments and governments who get influenced by the perceived convenience of warrant and subpoena-free surveillance.
I carry a cell phone... and thankfully the Supreme Court has agreed that my location data that comes off of it is protected from warrantless search.
The heart of your argument is that people shouldn't do anything new unless they accept all of the downsides as-is... but that's a moronic argument. Society is built by people doing new things _but also_ working to come up with new agreements on how to manage the side effects of those new things. This is normal and natural.
What's wild is your decision to mock people who want to preserve liberty while advancing technology.
American Patriots need to keep fighting to deal with the whole host of issues that will keep arising as the ability to acquire, store, and analyze data gets cheaper and cheaper.
So nice to see such enormous time and resources being spent on catching actual criminals
This is their idea of what counts as a real criminal. Instead of, say, someone who rapes children. They'll vote for that person!
Honestly, I'm at a loss for words.
I drive too even though there is a risk of death. The juice is worth the squeeze.
Except even armed with positive identification, the police won’t do anything. Laws with enforcement are worth nothing. Stalking and whatever else has happened with the data is already illegal. But who gives a shit without enforcement.
Police have been granted wildly more powerful capabilities and arms over the course of my lifetime, but from what I've seen, those haven't improved their ability to solve crimes or better serve their communities nearly enough to justify their erosion of civil liberties; in my estimation, it's been an opposite trajectory, with violent escalations by police increasing and community trust in police decreasing (nearly monotonically) across the country.
This showed up at the top of HN for me today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713395
Read the linked article; does that seem like "absurdly small" amounts of abuse to you? Besides, when we're talking about a surveillance network so vast you can't avoid it anywhere in the country, the law of large numbers kicks in: there IS abuse, and there WILL be further abuse at some level. The extreme reach of such systems means they should absolutely be treated as 4th amendment violations; the authors of that amendment could never have conceived of such a panopticon and its impacts on individual privacy and autonomy.
Meanwhile, my grandad lied about his age to go kill Nazis as a teenager. This infantalization of grown-ass people is distressing.
1. Why is the city creeping on children with surveillance cameras? I'd be tempted to run for city council and beat that drum until the head broke (but then I'd have to serve on the city council).
2. How did they identify the children enough to come to their home? Might have read the license plate, but reporting is unclear.
3. Why is our municipality buying such crappy equipment that it fails when kids do what kids have done with swings for 100 years or more?
Lol. The same thing, but obfuscated. It's not "pay for the damage"; it's "an opportunity was provided to address the matter through restitution". It's not "or your children will be charged"; it's "rather than unnecessarily continuing juvenile proceeding". Add extra fluff at the start to bury the lede, then avoid the trigger words and pretend it's something different.
Swings have always broken. Before widespread surveillance the swing would have just been replaced or not and everyone would have moved on.
We know that the leader flock is having security problems where literally anyone could access the livestreams, the others are probably not better.
My worst fear would be that pedophiles would use the streams to find and abduct victims in broad daylight by posing as cops.
But on topic, it's amazing they're getting these things through budget meetings. Are Flock just giving them away in Y1? They're ~$3k including installation and that clip showed several in one area overlapping. Even for legit crime-fighting, that's a lot of taxpayer green on the line for a park.
"We caught the culprits for damaging a $10 swing chain and spent $3000 surveilling them, $200 demanding three settle and $500 prosecuting one in court."
All for doing something that every who's ever been on a swing has done. Everyone involved in taking this to court should personally pay damages and lose their job.
'Children tend to swing on their stomach. This behavior should be discouraged.'
Not banned, discouraged.
I recommend reading the whole thing, it is surprisingly well done and covers a lot of things that should be obvious but are easy to forget.
"Single and dual lens live and recorded video cameras with remote PTZ controls. Ideal for open areas like parking lots, intersections and parks."
Why is the quality of discussion on this topic on HN so poor? I'm not even pro-Flock, but a blatantly false post like this is just pathetic discourse.
poor quality of HN discussion -- that's something not with thinking about. Flag the submission and move on.
I actually like her videos, and watch them to learn about some of the issues. I generally agree with her. Hear me out.
I had an "AHA" moment recently, where she posted a video about data centers. There's real issues there. I don't disagree with most of the issues, but I do disagree about the prioritization of the issues. Being a techie, I am directly involved in hosting workloads in data centers for my company. I know more than a lay person about what data centers are about.
So the very first time I watched a video on a topic I am a SME on, I saw her weigh in with the hot take of "All these data centers are basically surveillance centers!" She's not wrong, but what she is is just repeating what everyone on Facebook is saying without actually trying to understand the issue. Charitably this is word-for-word what people who are waking up to the issue are screaming all over social media, or less charitably people consuming a lot of astroturfed content.
TL;DR, I realized she's not really educating herself on the issues via deep dives before forming an opinion, she's just repeating what everyone else is saying on social media. She's no better than all my neighbors on Nextdoor, just a much better public speaker. If you're screaming about "surveillance centers", you are uninformed if you're not talking about data brokers. Nobody screaming on social media about data centers is. This very forum has people who have worked for data brokers saying things like, "It's 1000x worse than you think it is."
So, unfortunately, I can't use her content to form opinions. Even though I agree with her on most things. I can't trust that she's actually got her facts straight - she's running a confidence game. It's like finding a PR from your trusted coworker with a really, really stupid nasty bug - "what else is out there that they've touched...?"
Now that I've got that put out there...
This new privately owned surveillance network in a sane version of this country should be found unconstitutional, and this story about preteens being brought up on charges is only surprising for the reasons she highlighted.
Not surprised at all.